Digital imaging devices are becoming increasingly popular for still and video imaging operations. Numerous advancements for these devices have been made including increased resolutions and improved processing speeds. However, some digital video imaging device configurations are limited in resolution and framerate, in part, because of limited bandwidth available for accessing digital image data from an imaging sensor. One possible bottleneck in the data acquisition of some sensor configurations is the analog-to-digital conversion operations.
In color electronic imaging, digital images are typically captured with either full color at each pixel, or a mosaic of different color sensors with a single color at each pixel. In the mosaic approach, the incoming image may be resolved into three color channels and demosaiced. Interpolation of neighboring pixels is performed to determine red, green, blue (R, G, B) values or other color space values at each point on an image.
In the full color approach, each sensor pixel may include a layered structure with photodetectors for detecting R, G, B color components stacked within respective layers of individual pixels—each photodetector is tuned to capture a corresponding respective color component. Disadvantages of the mosaic approach include color aliasing which leads to objectionable color patterns on objects, while disadvantages of the full color approach include complex processing of full color image data.
At least some embodiments of the present invention relate to imaging apparatuses, image data processing methods, and articles of manufacture which provide improved digital imaging.